The War of the Worlds Murder - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,79
has contributed his expertise on the history of radio to numerous fact-filled booklets included with boxed sets of old radio shows on CD and cassette, often for the first-rate Radio Spirits. Such booklets on both the Shadow and Orson Welles were most helpful here.
The notion for this novel seemed a natural—that the sixth “disaster” novel would involve the world’s most famous fake disaster. And I frankly thought it would be a relatively easy book to write, compared to such major events as the Pearl Harbor attack and the sinking of the Lusitania. What George Hagenauer later reminded me—when I was drowning in research—was that when I wrote my Black Dahlia novel, Angel in Black (2001), the single Orson Welles chapter took as much research as the entire rest of the book, which covered a very complicated and convoluted murder case.
This novel took much longer to write than is usually my process, because I just could not stop reading about Welles and watching his films. In terms of the latter, the late Charlie Roberts of Darker Image Video provided numerous rare items, including the American Film Institute tribute to Welles, a BBC documentary on the filmmaker, and a vintage TV play, “The Night America Trembled.” I screened most of Welles’s films, including Chimes at Midnight (1966) and The Immortal Story (1968), criminally unavailable in the United States, and three documentaries: Gary Graver’s Working with Orson Welles (1995); It’s All True (1994), narrated by my pal Miguel Ferrer; and The Dominici Affair (2001), which explores a famous French murder case (the latter two films attempt to assemble and complete unfinished Welles projects).
And Welles touches on “The War of the Worlds” in his wonderful free-form documentary, F for Fake (1973)—in which he wanders between shots in a Shadow cape and slouch hat, and all “excerpts” from the broadcast are bogus!
Books on this great American filmmaker/actor are not in short supply, and the ones I found most beneficial are Citizen Welles (1989), Frank Brady; Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (1997), Simon Callow; the Welles-approved Orson Welles: A Biography (1995), Barbara Learning; and Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (1996), David Thomson.
But I would like to single out This Is Orson Welles by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, as a wonderful collection of interviews (edited and rewritten and shaped by Welles). The revised, expanded edition of 1998 is much preferred, as the additional autobiographical introductory essay (“My Orson”) by Bogdanovich is well worth the price of admission, and arguably the best glimpse into the real Welles available anywhere. No one writes about the important figures of classic Hollywood with more intelligence, candor, humor, warmth, insight and humanity than Bogdanovich.
Other Welles books consulted include: Citizen Kane: The Fiftieth-Anniversary Album (1990), Harlan Lebo; The Making of Citizen Kane (1985), Robert L. Carringer; Orson Welles (1971), Maurice Bessy; the controversial Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (1985), Charles Higham; Orson Welles: Actor and Director (1977), Joseph McBride; Orson Welles (1986), John Russell Taylor; Orson Welles Interviews (2002), edited by Mark W. Estrin; Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life (2003), Peter Conrad; and Orson Welles (1972), Joseph McBride. Years ago I read Pauline Kael’s The Citizen Kane Book (1971), but I find it unkind and poorly researched, and didn’t bother to dip back in.
A few magazines were of use: “The Man from Mercury” in the June, 1938, Coronet included many photos of the theater company at work; and Photocrime (a 1944 one-shot from “The editors of LOOK”) included a photospread mystery story starring magician Orson Welles—a George Hagenauer find.
My portrait of Welles is a “best guess” based upon all I’ve read and seen, but its roots are in the memoirs of his estranged ex-partner, John Houseman. Including Houseman as a character was a treat, if a challenge, as I loved Houseman’s Professor Kingsfield in the film and television series, The Paper Chase; his autobiographical Entertainers and the Entertained (1986) and Run-through (1972) are fascinating, frank, vividly written accounts.
Many (including Welles) consider Houseman to be an enemy of Welles’s reputation; and yet for all the dirty laundry aired in his memoirs, Houseman’s respect and love for the artist and man are palpable. It seems to me most of Welles’s films—from Citizen Kane (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), from Othello (1952) to Chimes at Midnight—are driven by the subtext of this failed friendship. Their bittersweet platonic “affair” provided me with a solid central conflict for a novel about this event and these times.